This blog post is part four of a series describing a recent visit my son Alex and I made to Belgium and France. In my first three posts I described our several days in Brussels, Ypres, and the Somme. This post describes our visit to Amiens.
Amiens, a middle-sized city that has spilled out onto the surrounding landscape in the last half-century, is the capital of Picardy. Jules Verne lived here. The two world wars of the 20th century brought Amiens its share of Jules-Verne-like adventures, with futuristic airships dropping bombs and modernistic armies creating havoc and extensive redevelopment opportunities. Some 1500 years earlier Attila the Hun ravaged the area, and a millennium or so after that the Spanish occupied it during the Wars of Religion. In short, Amiens has a long history.
As it happens, we didn't wind up seeing much of modern Amiens. Our GPS veered us off the highway, through a neighborhood where the old city walls must have stood, and into the center of ancient Amiens, a rocky bluff above the Somme River with the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the summit.
Amiens, a middle-sized city that has spilled out onto the surrounding landscape in the last half-century, is the capital of Picardy. Jules Verne lived here. The two world wars of the 20th century brought Amiens its share of Jules-Verne-like adventures, with futuristic airships dropping bombs and modernistic armies creating havoc and extensive redevelopment opportunities. Some 1500 years earlier Attila the Hun ravaged the area, and a millennium or so after that the Spanish occupied it during the Wars of Religion. In short, Amiens has a long history.
As it happens, we didn't wind up seeing much of modern Amiens. Our GPS veered us off the highway, through a neighborhood where the old city walls must have stood, and into the center of ancient Amiens, a rocky bluff above the Somme River with the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the summit.
Amiens Cathedral of Notre Dame, West Façade. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Amiens Cathedral, begun in 1220 and completed in 1288, is larger than it looks. It is the largest cathedral in France in both height and internal volume. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris would fit inside it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens_Cathedral
Our hotel was almost adjacent to the cathedral. Alex asked at the hotel desk what else there was to do in Amiens and we were advised not to miss the nightly fete in the cathedral square, which included a light show. We assumed “fete” meant jongleurs, rat catchers and Morris dancers prancing about to sackbut and flugelhorn, while buxom soutanes and flirty chasubles kept the famished mob happy with stoneware tankards of malted beverage. We resolved not to miss the medieval cosplay by any means. Having sampled some quite decent beer at the café across the street, we headed out to walk around the cathedral and down into the formerly medieval town. Circling the cathedral on foot, one soon gets an idea how this structure just goes on and on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens_Cathedral
Our hotel was almost adjacent to the cathedral. Alex asked at the hotel desk what else there was to do in Amiens and we were advised not to miss the nightly fete in the cathedral square, which included a light show. We assumed “fete” meant jongleurs, rat catchers and Morris dancers prancing about to sackbut and flugelhorn, while buxom soutanes and flirty chasubles kept the famished mob happy with stoneware tankards of malted beverage. We resolved not to miss the medieval cosplay by any means. Having sampled some quite decent beer at the café across the street, we headed out to walk around the cathedral and down into the formerly medieval town. Circling the cathedral on foot, one soon gets an idea how this structure just goes on and on.
A convex area. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
A concave area. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
A straight stretch. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
The remains of the old town below the bluff include ruins, fragments from many centuries that have been repaired and re-repaired over and over again, obviously to no avail. And yet they still stand and someone is even mowing the grass in anticipation of the next tenant.
Ruins of Amiens. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
The youths of the ville were fraternizing.
Youth is wasted on the young. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Down the side street shown above, we found the canals of the Little Venice of the North. The Somme is navigable below Amiens.
Canal-side living, Amiens. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
There were hints of antiquity.
Not a cathedral. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
A street like this goes somewhere. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
The discovery of restaurants. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Colors of Amiens. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
We found a restaurant we liked the looks of and dined on rustic French cooking like grandma used to make. Above us was the cathedral again. We had come in yet another circle. While we ate, we could not help reflecting that the day had begun at Mud Post and Plugstreet Wood, and that we had been down the Hawthorn Mine Crater and across Delville Wood, with almost nothing to eat but a lot of stupendously good cheeses, very nice slices of cold sausage and some remarkable local wine, along with the best efforts of various bakeries and coffee shops and such adventitious beer and macaroons as we had been fortunate enough to find in the wilderness. Now, climactically, we saw next to our canal-side table the Cat of Amiens, a not very famous animal that haunts the canals of the Venice of the North.
The cat of Amiens. Video by Gary Mawyer.
It was a rare vorpal cat with transdimensional skills, as the photo below shows.
Vorpal cat heading for other realities. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
The cathedral above us. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
This was the second cathedral we had seen on top of a bluff and would not be the last. Eventually we came to think these high seats are planted thusly for a reason. What, we speculated, is under these cathedrals? Something is—and by the law of superposition, it has to be something a lot older than cathedrals.
The waitress asked us where we were from, and seemed slightly taken aback that we were Americans. Alex’s French is natural enough to get him pegged vaguely as a regional citoyen of some sort but beyond that, apparently not many Americans slog through Amiens. “How did you like Paris?” the waitress said.
“We didn’t go to Paris,” Alex said.
“You came to Amiens instead of Paris?” she said. She seemed truly floored.
This was my opportunity to unleash the only complete French sentence I know: “Je ne regrette rien.” Otherwise it would be une faute objective.
It was now time to head off through the dusk to the cathedral fete. Imagine our surprise to find no jongleurs, no soutanes or even demi-soutanes. Instead, a projector array had been set up around the square to recreate the original polychrome in which the medieval cathedral had been painted when it was new. A long melodious narration accompanied the play of lights, with atmospheric Debussy and plainsong accompaniment. The show was divided into chapters, between which the projectors recreated cloudy moonlight blowing across the façade of the cathedral, representing the passage of time. The colors faded. They were lost. Then they were back, garish and somehow deeply moving, the veritable colors of the past, the face of the church as the 13th century knew it. Only 30 or 40 people at most had come out to see the cathedral fete. This seemed a shame—the effect was utterly strange. The music was trance-like, the narration liquid and at least to me unintelligible, and the flow of light and shade magical, cloud and color on the stony heaven and the carved arrays of the holy, the cloud of witnesses as it was imagined in sandstone in Picardy before Constantinople fell. A stranger thing than this would be strange indeed.
The next morning the cathedral opened with the sun and we were able to go inside.
The waitress asked us where we were from, and seemed slightly taken aback that we were Americans. Alex’s French is natural enough to get him pegged vaguely as a regional citoyen of some sort but beyond that, apparently not many Americans slog through Amiens. “How did you like Paris?” the waitress said.
“We didn’t go to Paris,” Alex said.
“You came to Amiens instead of Paris?” she said. She seemed truly floored.
This was my opportunity to unleash the only complete French sentence I know: “Je ne regrette rien.” Otherwise it would be une faute objective.
It was now time to head off through the dusk to the cathedral fete. Imagine our surprise to find no jongleurs, no soutanes or even demi-soutanes. Instead, a projector array had been set up around the square to recreate the original polychrome in which the medieval cathedral had been painted when it was new. A long melodious narration accompanied the play of lights, with atmospheric Debussy and plainsong accompaniment. The show was divided into chapters, between which the projectors recreated cloudy moonlight blowing across the façade of the cathedral, representing the passage of time. The colors faded. They were lost. Then they were back, garish and somehow deeply moving, the veritable colors of the past, the face of the church as the 13th century knew it. Only 30 or 40 people at most had come out to see the cathedral fete. This seemed a shame—the effect was utterly strange. The music was trance-like, the narration liquid and at least to me unintelligible, and the flow of light and shade magical, cloud and color on the stony heaven and the carved arrays of the holy, the cloud of witnesses as it was imagined in sandstone in Picardy before Constantinople fell. A stranger thing than this would be strange indeed.
The next morning the cathedral opened with the sun and we were able to go inside.
Cathedral aisle. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
The columns in the cathedral have taken a frightful beating over the centuries and it is a good thing the original masons designed them to survive the abuse. It was as if they knew somehow that time would be unkind.
Original stonework. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Effigies abound. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Bands of the saved, gathered above tablets commemorating the successful payment of indulgences. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Headlessness proved to be a recurring motif here, outside the building and inside.
Saints at the gate, everybody bring your head. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Judith and Holofernes, 18th Century style. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
The reason for the emphasis on heads is the presence in the building of the veridical head of St. John the Baptist, collected from Jerusalem by Saint Helen and then looted from Byzantium by Picard Crusaders and brought back to Amiens in triumph as a most telling souvenir, to become the chief treasure of the cathedral.
John the Baptist as he is today. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
We were coming to realize that bodies and bones are fundamental properties of cathedrals and part of what they have always been for. It does make one a little jealous. Bands of armed Crusaders are most unlikely to go scrabbling after my fossilized teeth and tidbits in centuries to come, much less hire artisans to embed the fragments in gold and declare them to be enshrined treasures. I went wrong somewhere. I don’t know where.
Golden shrines don’t seem to counteract the weird humility all bones have, and if that was not really John the Baptist it was surely somebody, somebody whose destiny was more than a trifle odd either way.
Golden shrines don’t seem to counteract the weird humility all bones have, and if that was not really John the Baptist it was surely somebody, somebody whose destiny was more than a trifle odd either way.
When hedgehogs went to church too. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Cathedrals are designed to channel light, and the columns in this one seem to resemble great groves of primordial trees; the naturalism is intense and includes plants and animals, as well as people, devils and angels; indeed in the original conception the idea seems to have been to conflate the Bible and the church establishment along with the local notables, the general population, and the beasts of the fields and fowls of the air, not to mention the crops and the weeds of the roadside and also every invisible or nonexistent thing the builders believed in as well. The cathedral is then an encyclopedia, mainly visual rather than textual, and in some ways a replica of the world, or an insistent reconfiguring of it. I particularly liked the hedgehog pictured above, but one does not want the intensity of the details to obscure the effect of the whole.
Architectural confidence. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Stunning windows. Practically no original glass remains. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
As Alex remarked, the 13th century builders of this cathedral had the same intellectual capacity we have. We may look at our science and literature, not to mention our entertainments and technological tools and toys, and the vast data stream of modern life, and wonder what these old-timers filled their empty heads with. But that would be a mistake. Their heads were as full as ours, and if we want to know what they thought about, they built it for us to see — the stupendous font of imagery in the Cathedral of Amiens, the geometry and the masonry, the arts and crafts on display, as well as the bones and the layered memorials of thirty generations.
But the day was young and the weather was perfect and it was time to be off to Reims, as will be described in my next post in this series.
But the day was young and the weather was perfect and it was time to be off to Reims, as will be described in my next post in this series.
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